Electronic forms

Currently, the interaction between form controls and screen readers can be unpredictable, depending upon the design of the page containing these controls. HTML forms pose accessibility problems when web developers separate a form element from its associated label or title. For instance, if an input box is intended for receiving a user's last name, the web developer must be careful that the words "last name" (or some similar text) appear near that input box or are somehow associated with it. Although this may seem like an obvious requirement, it is extremely easy to violate because the visual proximity of a form element and its title offers no guarantee that a screen reader will associate the two or that this association will be obvious to a user of assistive technology.

The following form demonstrates these problems. Visually, this form is part of a table and each field is carefully placed in table cells adjacent to their corresponding labels (n.b. formatting forms with tables are by no means the only situation presenting the accessibility problems inherent in forms; tables merely illustrate the problem most clearly).
While the relationship between the titles "First Name" or "Last Name" and their respective input boxes may be obvious from visual inspection, the relationship is not obvious to a screen reader. Instead, a screen reader may simply announce "input box" when encountering each input box. The reason for these difficulties is revealed from inspecting the HTML source for this table.